Al Gilhousen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> We have a heavily invested build sytem that does simultaneous multi-
> platform builds from the same source tree and uses symlinks to
> point to object storage that is local to each build machine and
> never in the same file system as the source tree.
> [...]
Although I don't understand your question in it's entire complexity, I think
it boils down to the above statement. You want to be able to create symbolic
links on all mounted servers and all clients should see the links in the
same way.
I can't talk much about NFS servers for Windows (because I have never used
one), but I can talk about Sharity and Sharity Light and I can make some
comments on samba.
1. Sharity Light can't do symbolic links.
2. Sharity -> Windows:
Sharity does not allow symbolic links by default. You have to enable them in
the configuration file. Since Windows does not have the concept of symbolic
links, Sharity fakes them with ordinary files (containing more or less the
path where the link points) which have special file attributes to distinguish
them from ordinary files. This means that symbolic links created by a
Sharity client will be readable by every other Sharity client, but not by NFS
clients and not by the server, of course, because Windows does not
understand symbolic links.
BTW: Sharity's symbolic links can be read by cygwin32 on NT. Symbolic links
created by cygwin32 can't be read by Sharity by default (because not all file
attributes are set correctly). It's probably simple to make Sharity
compatible to UWIN, too.
2. Sharity -> samba
Sharity's faked type of symbolic link will not work with samba servers by
default because samba does not support all of the DOS file attributes. A Unix
extension to CIFS (including symbolic links) has been in discussion about
two years ago, patches were available for samba, but they never made it into
the public samba release. Somewhat pity... If you NEED symbolic links on
samba with Sharity, and if you DON'T need the Unix execute permission,
Sharity can be configured to use only one DOS file attribute for symbolic
links. This would make symbolic links interoperable with samba.
Symbolic links created by Sharity would still be readable by other Sharity
clients only and not locally on the server and not by NFS clients.
3. samba
Since samba is available in source code, it should be relatively easy to
make it compatible to Sharity's way of faked symbolic links. If your problem
is "big enough" to justify some development effort, samba could be made to
recognize files with Sharity's link attribute and create a real symbolic link
locally. This would make Sharity interoperable with the server AND NFS
clients. BUT: You'd have to maintain a patched version of samba, which is a
bit of work on each new release.
Regards, Christian.
--
Dipl.-Ing. Christian Starkjohann
Objective Development
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.obdev.at/
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